In February, when Matthew Giraldi saw Kious Kelly for what turned out to be the last time, he was happy.

“We were walking through Times Square and I took a picture of him,” said Giraldi, co-owner of an event-planning company and a friend of Kelly’s for more than a decade. “That picture just to me was him. He was just beaming, he loved his life, he loved what he did.”

They were meant to have met again later that month, but Kelly had to cancel. “We were going to go to dinner,” Giraldi said, “but because his boss was out of the country, he was working these consecutive shifts, six days at that point, and then this thing broke out, and things got crazy.”

“This thing,” was the novel coronavirus, and as a nurse manager at Mt. Sinai West hospital in Midtown Manhattan, Kelly, 48, took the brunt of it, becoming what is thought to be the first nurse in New York City to die with COVID-19.

Kious Jordan Kelly, was born Marion James Smith IV in Chicago on Sept. 28, 1971. Kelly was a 1989 graduate of Everett High School in Lansing, Mich., where he won a scholarship from the Lansing Schools Education Association. He graduated from Butler University in Indianapolis in 1993. Kelly originally went to New York to become a dancer, and was a particular fan of the early 20th-century Polish ballet dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinski, according to his Facebook page.

“It didn’t surprise me when he decided to go into nursing though,” Giraldi said, remembering how proud Kelly was when he got into the nursing program at New York University, where he graduated in 2012. “And when he started working as a nurse, he absolutely loved it. I didn’t quite understand it; blood and stuff kind of creeps me out, but it didn’t bother him at all.”

Andy Humm, a journalist and board member of New York’s New Alternatives for Homeless LGBT Youth, recalled meeting Kelly just once, for 15 minutes, when he came to check in on a young man getting treatment at Mt. Sinai West, and “showed up with a rainbow pin and a calm, caring manner and made things happen for the young man — getting him pain relief and pulling him back from the brink of wanting to take his own life,” Humm wrote in Gay City News. “He was an angel to this troubled, homeless, African-American kid.”

By the time of his death on March 24, Kelly had been promoted to assistant manager of telemetry, the department that monitors data from patients in critical condition. Kayris Courtenay, a psychology student at New York City’s Nyack College, wrote about Kelly in September, in a report after her six-week internship with him.

“He taught me that being a leader can sometimes require you to do the dirty work,” she wrote “I’ve seen him take an elderly patient to the bathroom, change bedsheets, and kneel and hug a family member as their loved one passed away. His heart and love for the field is something I can’t put into words but can only marvel at his dedication. Not only is he empathetic for his patients but I’ve seen him bring joy into desolate rooms, dance around the hallways.”

She also recalled in an interview that he would give patients his phone number, telling them that he lived nearby and to call him if they needed anything.

“I said, ‘I’m not sure you should be telling people that,’ but he just laughed.”

The New York Times reported that Kelly was seen as late as the week of March 9 moving about the hospital without personal protective equipment (PPE) such as gloves and a mask, though it was unclear whether that was by choice or out of necessity.

Kelly’s death would have made the news if only because he was presumed to be the first casualty among the frontline of nurses in what had just become the viral epicenter of the United States, but it was the March 17 photo published in the New York Post of some of Kelly’s nursing colleagues wearing garbage bags because the hospital had reportedly run out of PPE, that made Kelly’s death of focus of nationwide outrage.

Kelly lived alone a few blocks from his hospital at the time of his death. He is survived by his parents, Karen and Marion Smith, of East Lansing; and his sister, Marya Patrice Sherron, of Indianapolis.

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